than 30 missions in Texas by the end of
the 18th century. The most important of
these was San Antonio in south-central
Texas, founded in 1718, the same year
France founded New Orleans near the
Gulf Coast just east of Texas.
San Antonio grew into the most
important Spanish town in Texas, thanks
in part to 56 colonists who migrated here
from the distant Spanish-owned Canary
Islands in search of new lives. It was
incorporated as a city in 1809. The best-
known remnant of colonial San Antonio
is The Alamo, a Franciscan mission
chapel built around 1722 that would
become the site in the 1830s of the most
famous battle in the war for Texan inde-
pendence from Mexico.
Spanish Texas was still thinly populat-
ed in the early 19th century, with no more
than 4,000 Hispanic settlers. The bound-
SPAIN IN THE AMERICAS 59Selected Spanish Settlements in Texas, 1699–1725
Although the territory had been explored
several times in the 16th century, by 1700
few Spaniards had actually settled in
Texas. However, competition with France
in the early 18th century led to a wave of
Spanish fort and mission construction.
Seen above are locations of some of the
earliest forts and missions in Texas.THE ACEQUIA SYSTEM
On the dry plains of the Texas frontier,
rain was rare, making acequias, or irri-
gation ditches, so important to
Franciscan missionaries and other set-
tlers that cropland in Spanish Texas was
measured in suertes, an amount equal
to the land that could be watered in
one day.
Ironically, Muslims first introduced
the use of acequias to the dry regions
of southern Spain during the centuries-
long Moorish occupation. Franciscan
monks found acequias ideal on the arid
nothern frontier of New Spain.
To distribute the water, missionaries
and Indians constructed seven gravity-
flow ditches, five dams, and an aque-
duct—all told, a 15-mile system that
irrigated about 3,500 acres of land.
Today the best-preserved acequia
in the Southwest stands near Mission
Espada in East Texas. Indians on the mission had built a dam at Espada that was
completed by 1740, diverting river water into an acequia madre (mother ditch). Using
floodgates, an aguador (water master) controlled the volume of water sent to each
field for irrigation and for such auxiliary uses as bathing, washing, and power for mill
wheels. More than 250 years later, the Espada dam still operates, and water still pass-
es through the Espada Aqueduct—one of the oldest arched Spanish aqueducts in
the United States.The acequia at Mission Francisco de
Espada in east Texas(National Park
Service)